The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire

“We are making a film about an artist who didn’t want to be remembered,” says Zita Hanrot, the actress playing an actress grappling with the legacy of the real-life figure she’s supposed to be playing: the Martinique writer Suzanne Césaire. Overshadowed by her husband, the poet and politician Aimé Césaire, Suzanne was a feminist activist as well as a member of the Négritude movement in Paris in the 1930s. For her bold project of reclamation, filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich has taken a metacinematic and mesmerizing approach, using voice-over and direct address to evoke her writing, as well as meditative, immersive 16mm images of forests in Martinique to burrow to the complex truths about a woman, artist, and mother forgotten to history. Uniting Hunt-Ehrlich’s elegant narrative and visual strands is the presence of Hanrot, herself a new mother going through her own reckoning.